WampServer

Hello all,

I have used WAMP many times before to host wordpress sites so not sure what's happening here, although this is a fairly new system.

I am running Windows 8 on a new 64bit AMD machine. With a bit of the usual fiddling, WAMPserver ran fine for a few days. Today, I turn on the computer and get "Error establishing a database connection" whenever I try to access any wordpress files. Before I messed around too much with the install, I tried to set up a new fresh installation of Wordpress to see if this had anything to do with it. However, this produces the same result.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have tried reinstalling WAMP, and tried other versions of PHP and MySQL etc... Nothing else seemed to change on my system and all other pages are running ok.

Any ideas please? This is quite urgent.

I just answered my own question.

Although all my sites are under aliases, it seems that if there is a wp-config.php in the next folder above the alias, wordpress will take the settings from this file - even though apache has nothing specified for the folder above at all! That's quite silly really.... Why does it do that?

Anyway, so the trick is, don't have any wp-config files in a folder directly above your alias, regardless of how well you have set it up.

Thanks for reading.

If you are running WordPress you are better to set up Virtual Hosts, one for each WP site you run.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to set them up.







HowTo: Create Virtual Hosts in WAMP

BEFORE DOING ANY OF THIS PLEASE ENSURE APACHE AND MYSQL ARE WORKING PROPERLY FIRST!!!


1. Create a new folder outside the wamp directory structure.
for example

C:\websites

but this can be on any disk drive visible to the PC running wamp


2. Create a subfolder in c:\websites for each site you want to create.
for example:

C:\websites\site1
C:\websites\site2

3. Edit the file C:\wamp\bin\apache\apachex.y.z\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
where x,y and z are the version numbers of apache that you actually have installed.

NOTE: If you are switching between 2 or more versions of apache this will have to be done to all your versions of apache in turn.

SUGGESTION: I like to use the format sitename.localhost to make it obvious to me that I am dealing with my localhost copy of a site, you may prefer another notation, thats ok, the word localhost has no actual defined meaning in this case, its just my way of naming my development versions of a live site.


example contents:

	#
	# Use name-based virtual hosting.
	#
	NameVirtualHost *:80

	## must be first so the the wamp menu page loads when you use just localhost as the domain name
	<VirtualHost *:80>
	    DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www"
	    ServerName localhost
	    Order Deny,Allow
	    Deny from all
    	Allow from 127.0.0.1
    	# You would never want a remote user to see this wamp config page.
	</VirtualHost>

	<VirtualHost *:80>
	    DocumentRoot "C:/websites/site1"
	    ServerName site1.localhost
	    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
	    <Directory "D:/websrc/www/site1">
			AllowOverride All
			Order Deny,Allow
			Deny from all
			Allow from 127.0.0.1
		    #If you want to allow access from your internal network
		    # For specific ip addresses add one line per ip address
		    #Allow from 192.168.0.100
	    	# For every ip in the subnet, just use the first 3 numbers of the subnet
	    	#Allow from 192.168.0
		</Directory>
	</VirtualHost>

Add as many <VirtualHost> as you require so each of your sites have one, changing the DocumentRoot, ServerName and any other of the parameters as appropriate.
This also allows you to make SITE SPECIFIC changes to the configuration.

NOTE: This will make the wamp manager "Put Online" function no longer have any effect of your sites, so leave it OFFLINE.
If you want to put one or more sites online you will have to change the Allow commands MANUALLY in this my-vhosts.conf file.

To check your subnet do the following:
Launch a command window, and run

    >ipconfig

Look for the line "Default Gateway" in the output and use the third number in your Allow commands.


4. Edit your httpd.conf file and search for these lines, they are near the bottom of the file.
# Virtual hosts
#Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

5. Add a line under these to include your vhosts file, this will cause apache to register their existance.
Leave the origial httpd-vhosts.conf unchanged, it may serve as a useful reference if you get something wrong.
Also make a backup of this file as if you re-install or upgrade wamp it may be lost.
example:

Include conf/extra/my-vhosts.conf

6. While still editing your httpd.conf file search for

	#   onlineoffline tag - don't remove
	    Order Deny,Allow
	    Deny from all
	    Allow from 127.0.0.1

	</Directory>

DO NOT CHANGE THESE LINES!

Add the following after the <\Directory> tag

<Directory "C:/websites/">
    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Directory>

This is to set security on your new directory structure so that access to these new sites is only allowed from 127.0.0.1 (localhost) and your internal network.
P.S. Your internal network will probably be something like 192.168.x.y, check your system first!


7. Now in order for your browser to know how to get to these new domain names i.e. site1.localhost and site2.localhost, we need to tell windows what IP address they are located on. There is a file called hosts that is a hangover from the days before Domain Name Servers (DNS) were invented. It is a way of giving nice easy rememberable names to IP address's, which of course is what DNS Servers do for us all now.

Edit your HOSTS file, this can be found in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
and is a file called "hosts", the file does not have an extension.
Windows protects this file so you must be an Administrator to be allowed to save changes to this file.

If you are using VISTA or Windows7/8 you may think you are an Administrator BUT YOU ARE NOT!!!!
So to edit this file you must launch your editor, or Notepad in a specific way to gain Administrator rights. To do this find your editors icon and launch it using the following key strokes:
Shift + Right Click over its icon, this will display a menu, click the item "Run as Administrator", and click "Allow" on the challenge dialog that will appear.

Now you are ready to edit the hosts file so navigate your editor to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add the following lines to this file

   127.0.0.1   site1.localhost
   127.0.0.1   site2.localhost

NOTE: You will need to add lines to this file for each new virtual host site you create.



8. In order for Apache to pick up these changes you must bounce apache.
Do this by: Wamp manager -> Apache -> Service -> Restart Service


You should now be able to use the address site1.localhost in your browser to get to your new sites.
Copy your sites code into the "C:/websites/xxxx" folder if you already have a site coded or,
place a quick and simple index.php file into the "c:\websites\xxxx" folder to proove it all works.

example:

   <!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en-US">
   <head>
   <meta charset="UTF-8">
   <title>SITE1</title>
   </head>
   <body>
   <?php echo '<div style="background-color:red;color;white;text-align:center;font-size:18px">HELLO FROM Site1</div>'; ?>
   </body>
   </html>

TROUBLE SHOOTING:
If you have used the new domain name ( site1.localhost ) and it has not found the site.
a. Check the changes to the hosts file.
b. Restart the "DNS Service" that runs in windows. This caches all doman names that you use in a browser so that the browser does not have to query a DNS Server each time you re-use a domain name. This may have cached your failed attempt but a restart is easy and should solve the problem and is quicker that re-booting windows, which should also work.
To do this launch a command window as an Administrator ( Shift + Left Click over the command window icon ) and run these 2 commands.

>net stop "DNS Client"
>net start "DNS Client"
Note: The quotes are required as there is a space in the services name.

That's a great reference post, thank you!